Fibre Channel (FC) provides practical, inexpensive, expandable means of transferring data between workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, desktop computers, storage devices, displays and other peripherals at fast data rates. Fibre channel is especially suited for connecting computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives.
Fibre channel provides an active intelligent interconnection scheme, called a fabric, to connect devices. Fibre channel ports only have to manage a simple point-to-point connection between itself and another fibre channel device. Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) predominantly transports Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) commands over Fibre Channel networks.
A proxy is a device that acts as an intermediary among two or more devices. Proxies can be used for improving performance, load balancing, management, or adding new functionality. A fibre channel network can be used for connecting the proxy to different processing elements. However, the fibre channel network should provide sufficient bandwidth in order for the proxy to operate efficiently.